WASHINGTON, June 1 (UPI) -- The Agni III ICBM, the pride of India's strategic deterrent force, has been shot down before it could even conduct its first test flight. Why did the Indian government pull the plug?
The ambitious rail and road-mobile Agni III was the pride of the Indian strategic missile program and was designed to have a range of at least 2,000 miles, giving it the capability of reaching almost all of China with nuclear weapons.
Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee said May 16, "As responsible members of the international community, we want to keep our international commitments on non-proliferation." Those comments certainly suggested that U.S. pressure had been behind the decision not to test the new ICBM. And many analysts came to that conclusion.
"The United States has always been very suspicious about India's Agni program, and in 1994 persuaded it to suspend testing of (earlier, shorter-range versions of) the missile after three test flights," a report in Asia Times Online said on May 25. "The U.S.-backed Missile Technology Control Regime seeks to prevent the proliferation of missiles capable of delivering a 1,100-pound payload over distances of more than 180 miles."
But the Indian government denied that U.S. pressure had anything to do with their decision. And there is good reason to believe their denials.
The Bush administration remains gung-ho about its developing strategic relationship with India. If anything, administration hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their advisers would welcome the test flight of the Agni III. In their eyes, it would put India on the strategic map and give it far more credibility as a potential threat and counterweight to China on the continent of Asia.
Democratic Party heavyweights and potential presidential contenders have been notable by their silence on the issue, and by their failure to jump on the anti-proliferation bandwagon to oppose it.
The problem for the pro-India Bush administration hawks is that no major leaders in New Delhi -- in either the ruling UPA-Congress alliance or the main Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party opposition -- want to play the role Washington strategists have dreamed up for them. India's relations with China were dramatically warming up even in the last year of the old BJP-led coalition in 2003-4 under then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the trend has only intensified under his successor Manmohan Singh.
Mukherjee has just concluded a highly successful visit to Beijing, where he signed a potentially far-reaching Memorandum of Understanding with China. And on June 15, India will attend as an invited and friendly observer the fifth anniversary summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by Russia and China. The SCO, also known as the Shanghai Pact, is dedicated to opposing the spread of U.S. influence in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. But it is actively seeking close diplomatic and even strategic ties with India, as well as with Pakistan and Iran.
Singh's ruling Congress Party has traditionally sought close relations with China, ever since the idealistic days of the Non-Aligned Movement led by Jawarhalal Nehru, Mao Zedong and Indonesian President Sukarno in the 1950s.
Singh has made clear that he would rather spend money on social programs than on ambitious strategic missiles that he believes India does not need.
"I have been concerned about the problems of cost and time overruns which have plagued our defense industry for decades now," the prime minister said in mid-May. "For it is also true that each project that undergoes cost and time overruns is also siphoning off vitally regarded resources away from other defense projects, and ultimately, from the nation's poor."
The main strategic threat to India is not directly from China, but from Pakistan's formidable intermediate-range ballistic missile program. Pakistan is believed to have up to 150 usable nuclear warheads. Much of the technical excellence and accuracy attributed to the Pakistani intermediate-range missile force is thought by U.S. and Indian intelligence analysts to be caused by components supplied by China.
But India already has a formidable intermediate range nuclear-capable missile force of its own with the Agni-II IRBM. India is also developing, as Israel did before it, a survivable second strike nuclear capability with nuclear-armed cruise missiles carried on board French-built Skorpene diesel submarines.
So developing the Agni-III only makes sense if India believes it is going to face a serious direct strategic threat from China in the immediate or foreseeable future. But India-China relations have been warming under both BJP-led and UPA-Congress-led governments for the past three years.
It is India, not China, that is developing an ambitious eventual three aircraft carrier surface fleet to potentially control the crucial oil export seaways out of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. China is not currently planning to build any carriers at all, and may therefore be dependent on India at some future point to ensure the security of its own oil import sea trade from the Middle East.
The decision not to test-fire the Agni-III, therefore, was not made out of weakness, fear or some naive, misplaced idealism. It was based on shrewd power calculations in Delhi. India currently enjoys the benefits of excellent strategic relations with the United States, Russia and China. It has already reaped rich dividends from its close ties with both Washington and Moscow. It is likely the warming ties between India and China will also see some interesting quid pro quos.
